Randomized Damage Attack

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In a combat game, with everything else considered such as basic attack damage, the attacker's strength, the victim's defense and resistance, and anything else that may modify the damage, a same attack will always do the same damage to the same enemy. Either that, or the game doesn't use a damage formula to begin with.

This, however, is when an attack doesn't always deal the same damage every time - it highly depends on your luck.

In some games (notably RPGs), even normal attacks have a range of values as their base damage. The idea is: No two strikes are ever the same. Maybe you hit a previous injury, or an armored part of the monster, something that's subject to the gameplay's conservation of detail. For games like these, only examples where an attack has a particularly wide range of damage values should be listed here.

Note that this doesn't just apply to attacks - it may be buff spell, defensive technique, even healing - so long as its effects vary depending on random chance.

The Gambler class usually will have many attacks of this property as part of their gimmick.

Drake's Neutral Square combos comes with a potential right-hook or uppercut, which both result in lifting the victim a short height into the air, and a frontal kick which knocks them onto their backside for a moment. For the combo's sake, you'll probably want the kick.

Good Cole's results in him either bashing the enemy with his amp in two different ways, both resulting in an eject roll, or jamming his palm into them for a crumple-state. Considering that Cole gets his major damage from combos, you'll probably want the crumple.

In the Super Smash Bros. series, Mr Game & Watch's side special attack (called "Judgement") does random damage AND random effects ranging from Mr Game & Watch damaging himself through various Status Effects to smashing the opponent off the map for a One-Hit Kill. Which effect you get corresponds to the number above his head.

In Arcana Heart, a character using Saligrama will get a dice attack where the damage is of course randomized and can sometimes get a buff if you're hit, you hit your opponent or you take fatal damage.

Team Fortress 2 by default used to have nearly every weapon's damage slightly randomized (10% more or lessTechnically It's actually the distance between attacker and target that had a random amount added or subtracted, which in turn affected the damage.), with the exception of Critical Hits. This was changed in a later update, however.

Dofus has a gambling class in Ecaflips who have moves that deal damage randomly between a minimum and maximum base damage amount. The majority of their skills have random base damage, and are themed around gambling themes like card games, slot machines, and coin flipping. Some of their skills even heal the enemy back a small amount to add to the gambling theme.

In Elsword, Trapping Ranger's Fatality skill can deal either massive, medium, low or Scratch Damage in one hit.

Perhaps one of the biggest complaints about World of Tanks is the RNG involving nearly all aspects of a shot. Guns generally display their average damage when viewed in-game. Actual damage can vary by 25% in either direction and a string of low damage rolls can seriously hamper a player, especially at higher tiers as average damage and variance increase.

Phantasy Star Online 2 has the Meteor Fist Photon Art for the Knuckles weapon. This is a chargeable attack that causes golden fists to rain down on your foes. How the fists manifest vary by chance; you can get one small fist, a rain of small fists, or one gigantic fist that does absurd damage. However, the attack needs to be charged in order to see the giant fist at all. There's a reason why it's also called "RNG Fist" by players.

Chaos Knight from Dota2 has Chaos Bolt, which inflicts a random but inversely-related amount of damage and stun. Upgrading the spell increases both the maximum and minimum values of both the damage and stun, but there's still a big difference between a 275 damage skill that stuns for 2 seconds, and one that does 100 and stuns for 4.

Dawn of War: Damage values for some units (especially orks) are all over the place, though this is less the damage and more the accuracy being random.

Roguelike

The old DOS game Wizard's Castle deals consistent damage with physical weapons, but the magic spell Fireball deals between one and fifteen points of damage, fifteen being enough to One-Hit Kill any adversary. Similarly, the Web spell will render an adversary unable to strike for as few as one turn to many as five turns.

The move Magnitude has a power between 10 (Magnitude 4) and 150 (Magnitude 10).

The move Psywave also does random damage; specifically it deals a random number between 0.5x and 1.5x the user's level.

Present does variable damage, in particular with a chance to do negative damage (ie heal the opponent).

Some moves, such as Fury Attack, Pin Missile, Bullet Seed and others, deal normal damage with each hit but hit a random number of times. This is negated if the user has the Skill Link ability, when they'll always hit the maximum amount of times (usually five) unless the opponent faints before all of them hit.

Accupressure chooses a random stat (between Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, Speed, accuracy, and evasion) and raises the stat of the selected target by two stages.

In several Final Fantasy games there's a high-level spell called "Comet" or "Meteor" with a huge variability in its damage output — it could do 100 points damage one turn and 9999 the next, when other spells are more consistent from one use to the next.

In Final Fantasy VI, Setzer's dice weapons do entirely random damage which is only affected by his level. The game rolls either two or three six-sided dice (depending on the weapon), then multiplies their face values together along with Setzer's level to get the final damage. Doubles and triples multiply the damage further. Since the enemy's defense isn't considered, these weapons are best used against enemies with exceptionally high physical defense such as Cactuars.

Cait Sith's Dice Limit Break in Final Fantasy VII, which rolls several dice and then inflicts damage equal to the result multiplied by 20 to one enemy.

In Final Fantasy IX, Quina's normal attack does random damage which is either pathetic or higher than any other physical attacker. This makes him/her a capable (if unreliable) Fighter-type character, but his/her specialty is Blue Magic anyway.

In Final Fantasy X, Wakka's Attack Reels overdrive deals as many hits as the number you line up in a quick slot reels Mini-Game. This can add up to quite a bit or be barely anything at all depending on the player's reflexes.

Axes and bombs in Final Fantasy XII vanilla did random damage (unless you scored a Critical Hit, in which case they were devastating.) That, and the fact that most of the better varieties of each weapon were hard to come by, made them unviable for anything beyond experimentation and Self Imposed Challenges.

Weapons in the Fallout series generally have a damage range listed in their stats.

In Super Mario RPG, enemy attacks have no random variation of damage, but the player's attacks do. The variation depends on the weapon; unarmed attacks have no randomness, whereas the Masher and Lazy Shell have a very large random factor.

The Trust mechanic in Valkyrie Profile works effectively like this. Overall potential damage is calculated by a weapon's power and the strength stat of the user, but then there's a variable that gets multiplied in based on the Trust rating of the weapon (with each trust point equal to 1%). A weapon with 100 trust will always do its maximum potential damage, while a weapon with 25 trust can do anywhere between 25% and 100% of its maximum potential damage. Worth noting is that the Infinity +1 Sword has a 1 trust - it's quite capable of doing Scratch Damage even at the end of a massive combo with a Finishing Move.

Epic Battle Fantasy gives Natalie the Lucky Star spell, which is cheap on MP, but its damage varies wildly-it can range from a mere tickle to damage highly devastating for such a cheap spell. 3 onward gives her Star Shower, a multi-hitting Area of Effect version of the spell.

Dungeons & Dragons. Almost all attacks that do physical damage (melee combat, spells, psionics, etc.) inflict a variable number of Hit Points. In fact it would be quicker and easier to list the attacks that always do the same damage. This is true of most games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons as well.

This game has several weapons with random strength or random amount of hits, usually determined by D6 or D3 roll. Examples include Chaos daemon weapons (random amount of hits) and Ork zzapguns (random strength). The most extreme example is probably the Dark Eldar Casket of Flensing, which has random range, random amount of shots and random strength.

Weapons with situational damage also exist, but are much rarer. The conversion beamer, a rare weapon available to certain Space Marine characters and Inquisitors, deals more damage the further away the target is, while the pulse submunition cannons of the Tau R'varna battlesuit increase in strength and amount of hits as the target's size increases.

In Advance Wars, Flak's CO power randomly makes his units do a lot more more damage or a lot less. His Suspiciously Similar Substitute Jugger has the same ability. Nell and her kid sister Rachel have a variant on this - their CO powers give their units a chance to do quite a bit more damage than usual, but without the "sometimes your hits will suck" part.

In X-COM, the weapon stats displayed in game show average damage. Guns roll from 0 to 200% of that, while explosives roll 50-150%. Lucky soldiers can survive point-blank heavy weapons fire while unlucky ones die to stray pistol rounds.

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